Facebook successfully recovers from global outage; But why it went down?

A picture illustration shows a Facebook logo reflected in a person's eye.Reuters

Social media platform Facebook and its subsidiary services suffered a major outage across global regions for the second time this month.

Last week, Facebook was down for just a few minutes, but this time it was longer and it also affected Instagram and WhatsApp in several pockets of the world including US, South America and Europe.

Several peopled weren't able to access and some couldn't post pictures or write on Facebook, Instagram and also share multimedia contents on WhatsApp. They took to Twitter to ask friends whether they faced similar problems and it was. Facebook also released a statement that it was looking in to issue and get back online.

Soon, Facebook was finally able to pinpoint the cause of the issue. As it turns out, the company was doing some routine tests on the server, which they previously didn't anticipate might affect their social media sites, but it did.

Facebook acknowledged their mistake and apologised to the users. Since then it has restored the service on all three platforms and as of now, there are no complaints on the social media sites.

"Earlier today, a routine test caused users to have trouble accessing or posting to all Facebook services including WhatsApp and Instagram. We quickly investigated and restored access for everyone. We're sorry for the inconvenience," a Facebook spokesperson told USA Today.

In a related development, Facebook released the biannual Transparency Report. Over the last several months, it has increased the scrutiny of the user accounts particularly false impersonation, circulating fake news, hate speech, propagate violence via terrorism propaganda and other disorderly acts.

With that, it has been able to deactivate more than 1.6 billion accounts from April to September, 200 million more than a previous six-month period.